The Truths we Burn (The Hollow Boys Book 2) by Monty Jay

Author:Monty Jay [Jay, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-15T18:30:00+00:00

Rook

I was baptized in gasoline as a child.

Born to ignite. Born to live and go down in flames.

Raised in the house of the Lord but christened by a touch of rebellion.

The rumor of my lineage, of me being the offspring of the Ruler of Hell, came after one random day in Sunday school. I was old enough to understand but too young to grasp what the rumors would do to my life.

We had been asked to share something with the class—an interesting fact, a cool talent, a strange food combination we enjoyed. A snippet of ourselves so that our peers could get to know us better and we could make friends.

There was a kid who had a pet fish named Flipper with one fin. A boy who was color-blind and a girl who liked eating peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, which I think was more blasphemous than anything I’d said.

When my turn came around, I stood up and lifted my shirt, exposing the side of my lower back where my birthmark was. It’s smaller now, but on my tiny body, it was pretty big. The coloration created this X shape or what I thought was that shape.

To me it was pretty cool, like X marks the spot, ya know? And as a kid who loved Pirates of the Caribbean, I thought this fun fact would be neat to share with my classmates.

But they didn’t see it as the marker of buried treasure or even the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet.

They saw it as an upside-down cross.

The Antichrist.

The mark of the beast.

Our Sunday school teacher tried to hush the whispers of children and the jokes they made, but the damage had been done. After that lesson, those kids ran to their parents and told them all about my birthmark.

It grew, grew, grew, until it became the monster it is today. Until I became the monster I am today.

From a simple coloration of the skin to my mother had prayed to the wrong deity. They talked about it like it was some lore or scary story around a campfire.

So when I gave in to chaos and became exactly what they wanted, they all acted as if they saw it coming. I was marked by the devil; it only made sense that I acted like him.

Like my friends, there came a point in my life where I gave up trying to be anything other than their rumors. I gave in to the reputation and turned into something much worse than they could have imagined.

I didn’t just become the son of the devil. No, I refused to bow beneath anyone’s feet. Not anymore.

They wanted this, right? They wanted to tear down what was left of a hopeless boy and make him into a monster they could hate.

They wanted evil, so I became the king of it.

The ruler of it all.

I’d become Lucifer himself.

I rained hellfire down and lived in sin.

“Change the fucking music, bro. This is worse than Alistair’s screamo,” I complain, squeezing the front of the wooden chair I’m straddling.

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